


The Nightmare

by wheel_pen



Series: Finn [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Clones, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:42:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4582869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finn has a bad dream, and Sherlock’s bed is magical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nightmare

**Author's Note:**

> The bad words are censored. That’s just how I do things.  
> This story has not been Britpicked. Please let me know if I get anything horribly wrong.  
> I hope you enjoy this AU. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play in this universe.

_The Nightmare_

Barking dogs always woke John up, and the neighbors yelling at each other, and sudden loud noises like a car backfiring—but not the garbage truck that Mrs. Hudson constantly complained about, or Sherlock playing the violin, or sirens going past. Hard to explain what sort of sounds triggered his brain to wake up, and what didn’t. Another sound that always woke him: the sound of someone walking around near the door to his room, especially since he was used to being the only person on this floor.

John realized after a tense moment that it was probably Finn, and he rolled out of bed and opened his door to see the boy padding down the hallway, away from his room. “Finn?” he whispered, trying not to startle him. He did not entirely succeed. “Are you okay?”

Finn wandered closer to him, hair askew, and John smiled as he reached out to smooth it down. “I forgot you were here,” the boy stated thoughtfully.

“Yes, I am,” John assured him. “Are you alright? Why are you up?”

“I was going to go play,” Finn explained, as if this was perfectly normal. “With my blocks, maybe.”

John prepared to be firm. “Finn, it’s the middle of the night,” he reminded him. “You need to be in bed sleeping, not playing. Are you having trouble sleeping?” he guessed.

“Well, I had a bad dream, and that woke me up,” Finn told him matter-of-factly, “and I didn’t want to go back to sleep right away. So I decided to go play.”

Immediately John felt bad. Add ‘small boys having nightmares next door’ to the list of things that apparently didn’t wake him up. He knelt to better look Finn in the eye and rubbed his arms soothingly. “Oh, I’m sorry you had a bad dream,” he told the boy. Finn didn’t seem overly upset, so John didn’t want to make a big deal of it. “D’you want me to come back to your room, and stay with you until you fall asleep?” Hopefully that would assuage both Finn’s fears _and_ John’s guilt.

But Finn merely looked at him like he was a bit slow on the uptake. “No, I want to go downstairs and play with my blocks,” he corrected.

John readied his ‘stern’ voice again. “No, you can’t go play,” he repeated. “If you go back to bed for a few minutes you’ll fall asleep—“

“I don’t _want_ to fall asleep, I want to play!” Finn protested. John sighed and sat down on the floor, fearing this was a problem that would outlast his knees. “That’s what I always do when I have a bad dream,” the boy added, with a bit of uncertainty finally.

“Here, sit down,” John instructed. “Tell me what you did before, when you had a bad dream.”

Half-hidden in the shadows, John could easily imagine he was seeing Sherlock’s face in front of him, which in a sense he was. “Well, I had a bad dream, and I woke up,” Finn related, trying to be precise, “and I cried for a while, because I was scared.” John nodded encouragingly, trying not to let too much emotion show on his face. “And then I didn’t want to go back to sleep, so I got up and played with my toys. Nobody made a _rule_ that I shouldn’t,” he added, a bit defensively.

“And nobody came to see you, or talked to you, or anything like that?” John asked, though he was certain he knew the answer already.

“No. I never saw _anybody_.” Finn obviously felt that should be clear at this point.

John sighed, suddenly feeling very tired. “Come here.” He pulled the boy onto his lap and embraced him, kissing the top of his dark curls. “From now on,” he said, “if you have a bad dream, you can come and get me or Daddy, and we will help you not be scared, okay? You don’t have to stay by yourself and be scared, we’re here now.” He tried to remember what a novel concept this was for Finn.

“But what if you’re asleep?” the boy asked sensibly.

“You just go ahead and wake us up,” John insisted. “Er, start with me. If you’re scared of something, or you feel sick.” If the boy started with Sherlock, John was certain to be woken anyway.

“Oh.” Finn gave this some thought. “I’m not to go play?” He sounded somewhat disappointed.

“No,” John reinforced. “If you stay up playing in the middle of the night, you won’t get enough sleep, and you’ll be grumpy in the morning. Were you grumpy in the morning before?”

“I don’t remember,” Finn replied, which was probably true. Grumpiness was harder to notice when you were alone.

“Alright.” John put the boy on his feet, then stood himself and took his hand. “Let’s go back to bed and see if you fall asleep, okay? I’ll be right there with you.”

“I’m not very sleepy,” Finn warned. He did _not_ punctuate this statement with a yawn, but rather seemed perfectly clear-eyed to John. Could be a tough case.

John thought of the child-sized chair in Finn’s room, and his tiny twin bed. Neither appealed to him for long-term use—he was at risk of being grumpy in the morning, too. “Do you want to sleep in _my_ bed for a while?” he offered instead.

“Can we sleep in Daddy’s bed?” Finn countered, and some very un-G-rated thoughts flashed through John’s head. “He’s got a shiny golden metal bed, like in _Bedknobs and Broomsticks_ ,” he added by way of explanation. “Do you think it’s magical?”

_Was_ Sherlock’s bed magical? John was afraid he was going to be preoccupied by the question now. “I think it’s just an ordinary bed,” he managed to say seriously. “It’s made of _brass_ , that’s what the metal is called. And if Daddy’s asleep, I don’t think we should wake him up right now.” Considering how little sleep Sherlock allowed himself anyway.

Finn’s expression set itself stubbornly, the way Sherlock’s did when he became determined to do something ill-advised. “I want to sleep in Daddy’s bed!” he insisted. “It’s magical, and it has Daddy, and it’s downstairs and the bad dreams are upstairs.” He ended this string of reasoning less confidently than he had begun it, looking anxiously at his and John’s darkened bedrooms. John reminded himself that Finn was only five, and he felt foolish for having forgotten—of course he was acting irrationally, he was a child who’d just had a nightmare.

“Alright, come on,” John told him in a lighter tone. “We’ll see if Daddy will let you sleep in his bed.”

“And you, too, John,” Finn said, tugging his hand as they went down the stairs. “Do you think we’ll all fit?”

“I expect so,” John replied, growing increasingly nervous as they approached Sherlock’s door. He could just see the man’s baffled expression, hear the withering tones in which he questioned why a child needed to share his bed—not to mention John! His ears turned pink just thinking about Sherlock’s assumptions on _that_ one.

Except, being Sherlock, his assumptions were never the ones normal people made. He would probably find nothing awkward at all about John asking to sleep in his bed. And somehow, that thought was depressing enough to calm John down.

He knocked lightly on Sherlock’s bedroom door, then pushed it open. His flatmate was sprawled across his bed, limbs dangling carelessly off the edges, still dressed in the clothes he’d worn the night before—it was a post-case crash into oblivion, apparently, as he didn’t even wake when John came right up to the bed and murmured his name. Discreetly John checked to make sure he was breathing.

Signaling to Finn to be quiet, he let the boy crawl under the covers next to Sherlock, then carefully joined them, trying not to move too much. Sherlock shifted slightly in his sleep but nothing more. John kissed Finn goodnight, and then they both closed their eyes and tried to relax.

**

Sherlock had an addictive personality. And now he felt he was becoming addicted to a new hobby: staring at John as he slept. The tiny twitches of his eyes under his lids as he dreamed, the way his short blond hair spiked at all angles like a living demonstration of chaos theory, the peacefulness that took years off his face. John, sleeping tranquilly in Sherlock’s bed—that indicated trust, didn’t it, a willingness to be vulnerable in his presence. Sherlock found it fascinating.

He lay very still and let John wake on his own, memorizing every flutter and stretch, the way his dark blue eyes looked softly on Sherlock for a long moment before suddenly sharpening. Then the tips of his ears turned slightly pink, the way they did when he was embarrassed. Maybe Sherlock had committed another faux pas, and you weren’t supposed to watch people wake up.

“Um, hi,” John finally mumbled, his voice thick with sleep.

“Good morning,” Sherlock replied. That was traditional, wasn’t it?

“Um, sorry,” John went on, and Sherlock raised an eyebrow. John yawned, covering his mouth, but tried to continue speaking anyway. “—nightmare, wanted to sleep in here with you,” he explained vaguely. “Is that okay?”

He looked so apologetic, like Sherlock was going to berate him; he hastened to reassure him. “No, it’s perfectly okay,” Sherlock promised. John still had nightmares—that was bad. But John felt safe with him, safe physically and also safe admitting to Sherlock he’d been scared—that was good. “It’s… flattering,” he added encouragingly. He tried a smile, which was a little stiff because he didn’t use it much. But John seemed to appreciate the effort and smiled back. “What was it about?” he inquired politely, although he supposed it was obvious.

Surprisingly John shrugged a bit. “Don’t know.” So either he really didn’t remember anymore—possible, dreams could dissipate quickly from the memory—or he was just brushing Sherlock off, and didn’t want to talk about it. It was a very cheerful brush-off, though, from the way John still smiled at him. “Wanted to play first, actually, but that would just lead to a grumpy morning, wouldn’t it?” he added with a smirk.

Sherlock frowned, trying to interpret this unexpected remark. “Does… playing… at night usually make you grumpy in the morning?” he asked carefully.

John’s ears turned redder. “Well, er, for _me_ , no, it’s fine to, er, _play_ at night, I mean of course if one has to, er, get up early, then perhaps one shouldn’t—“

There was something endearing, but also perplexing, about John getting flustered and pink _in Sherlock’s bed_. “Are we using ‘play’ as a euphemism for sex?” Sherlock guessed, finding this turn of events intriguing.

John did not seem to like his guess, however, becoming rather tense. “Shh! He’ll hear you!” he hissed at Sherlock.

“Who?” Sherlock was forced to ask, teetering on the brink between interest and alarm. Then John glanced down between them, and Sherlock’s eyebrows shot up. _Then_ John actually lifted the blankets to check beneath them, which Sherlock thought was maybe a bit theatrical, but still kind of charming. “Are you looking for something?” Sherlock asked him evenly. Perhaps he could help him find it.

“Oh, G-d,” John sighed, rubbing his face with his hand and flopping over onto his back. “Finn,” he finally said, and Sherlock nodded at his forethought, heart starting to pound.

“Well lock the door,” Sherlock suggested. “He’s probably still asleep.”

John turned to look at him, utterly confused. “What?”

In a flash Sherlock suspected he might have made an incorrect assumption somewhere along the line. “What?” he shot back, trying to sound even more disdainful, even as John’s _entire_ face went red.

“No, I mean— _Finn_ had a nightmare, last night,” John finally clarified. Sherlock waited. “He wanted to get up and go play with his toys, he said that’s what he always did before—“ Sherlock’s jaw tightened thinking of the place where the boy was raised—perhaps _grown_ was more accurate. “—but I said he ought to try and go back to sleep.” He frowned. “What was that about locking the door?”

“Nothing,” Sherlock dismissed quickly. “Not clear how you ended up in my bed.”

“Well, Sherlock, your bed is magical,” John replied, remarkably straight-faced, at least until he turned his head and caught Sherlock’s expression. Then he burst into laughter, tinged with a nervous release of tension, doubling over quite ridiculously.

Sherlock smirked involuntarily, then grinned and finally chuckled. “John, what are you talking about?”

“Oh, he wanted to sleep in here with you,” John finally explained, trying to catch his breath. “He wanted us _all_ to sleep in here, and you were out cold…” He tried to calm down. “I hope that’s okay.”

“Is that… normal?” Sherlock had to ask.

“Yeah.”

“It’s okay, then,” he agreed. “He seems to have gone, though.”

For some reason this gave John the giggles again. “Yeah. I suppose the little bugger woke up and got bored,” he decided affectionately. “Listening to two old blokes snoring…”

Sherlock frowned. “We’re not old,” he countered, “and we don’t snore. I’ve been observing you for the last half hour and you haven’t—“ He stopped when John raised an eyebrow. “Not normal?” he guessed.

John started to answer, then shrugged. “You watching me sleep is probably about as normal as you finding me in your bed at all,” he judged, then suddenly his gaze skittered away awkwardly.

“I’m not sure how to classify the two,” Sherlock admitted. Were they both normal, or not? He leaned towards the latter, based on John’s body language. Pity. But many of his hobbies weren’t normal, and John tolerated them well.

Before they could say anything else, the bedroom door opened and Finn peeked in. Seeing them awake he galloped over with a toy dinosaur in each hand and scrambled onto the bed in between them. “You both sleep quite a lot,” he observed, crashing the dinosaurs together.

“Why aren’t you ever up this early when you have school?” John complained good-naturedly, leaning over to kiss the boy’s head.

Finn did not know the answer to that. “You’re wearing what you wore out last night,” he noted to Sherlock.

“Yes.”

“Were you catching a bad guy?”

“Yes.”

“Do the bad guys,” Finn asked thoughtfully, “ever give you bad dreams?”

John’s eyes watching him closely, Sherlock reached over to take one of the dinosaurs from the boy and manipulated it to fight the other one. “I don’t remember my dreams,” he finally responded. Finn had no comment about this. “ _You_ had a bad dream last night, didn’t you?” he prompted.

Finn nodded, but verbally he replied, “I don’t remember.”

“I told him, next time he has a bad dream, he should wake us up,” John added, giving Sherlock a look that said he should agree.

“What good would _that_ do?” Sherlock asked curiously. “Dreams aren’t real. Though they _can_ represent real past events—“ He saw that he should have just agreed. “Mmm, yes, I suppose if you’re frightened about something, even if it isn’t real, approaching a trusted adult is a good option.” He glanced at John for reinforcement.

“Yes, exactly,” John said, swooping in to knock Finn over with a hug. The boy shrieked with laughter, showing no evidence of his former trauma. Sherlock didn’t mind Finn, or John for that matter, joining him in his bed after a nightmare—it was more the ‘waking up’ part that bothered him, as that suggested he was expected to _do_ something. Which was where he drew a blank, since apparently stating that dreams weren’t real was somehow unwelcome.

Research required.

“Alright, I’m going to make breakfast,” John said, working himself off the bed. “How about pancakes, then? Sherlock, you’ll eat a pancake, won’t you?”

Sherlock grimaced, remembering that since he’d solved a case, he was now supposed to attend to the transport’s needs. “Perhaps one,” he allowed. John smiled at him benevolently, so he knew that was the right answer, or the beginning of one anyway.

“Come on, let’s go make breakfast while Daddy showers,” John suggested, plucking Finn from the bed. Sherlock took this as meaning he needed a shower, not illogical after the day he’d had. He met John’s eye before he walked out and noted, with some interest, how the tops of his ears turned pink once more.


End file.
